'The Resurrection, Cookham', Sir Stanley Spencer, 1924–7 | Tate Sir Stanley Spencer Support: 2743 x 5486 mm Collection Presented by Lord Duveen 1927 Reference Catalogue entry Display caption Spencer believed that the divine rested in all creation. He saw his home village of Cookham as a paradise in which everything was invested with mystical significance. The local churchyard here becomes the setting for the resurrection of the dead. Christ is enthroned in the church porch, cradling three babies, with God the Father standing behind. Spencer himself appears near the centre, naked, leaning against a grave stone; his fiancée Hilda lies sleeping in a bed of ivy. At the top left, risen souls are transported to Heaven in the pleasure steamers that then ploughed the Thames. Gallery label, September 2016 N04239 THE RESURRECTION, COOKHAM 1923–7 Not inscribed. Canvas, 108×216 (274×549). Presented by Lord Duveen 1927.

Coll: Purchased by the Duveen Paintings Fund Committee from the artist through the Goupil Gallery 1927. Exh: Goupil Gallery, February 1927 (54), as ‘The Resurrection’; Tate Gallery, November–December 1955 (25). Lit: Connoisseur, LXXVII, 1927, pp.250–1; ibid., LXXVIII, 1927, pp.98–101, 185–6; Drawing and Design, II, 1927, p.105, repr. p.115; Johnson, 1932, pp.331–2; Chamot, 1937, p.74; Studio, CXXVI, 1943, p.50, repr. p.51; Rothenstein, 1945, p.14, repr.

pls.21–4; John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters: Lewis to Moore, 1956, pp.181–2; Spencer, 1961, pp.172, 174–6; Collis, 1962, pp.77, 80–9, 91, 143, 162, 193, 243. Repr: R. H. Wilenski, The Modern Movement in Art, 1927, pl.4; Newton, 1947, pl.9 (in colour). The setting is Cookham churchyard with the Thames in the background. God the Father and Christ with the little children are seen under the porch in the centre; several ‘thinkers’, including Moses, are near by. Both black and white people have been included to make the treatment as universal as possible. The artist is seen reclining on a tombstone in the bottom right-hand corner, and again, naked, head in profile to the right, close to the porch.

His wife Hilda is in the overgrown grave in the foreground; she also appears smelling a flower on the left; in the distance she is seen a third time climbing a stile which leads to the River of Life. The figure rising from the flowered grave in the foreground is a memory of Sir Henry Slesser in his judge's wig. The bad emerge from their graves with some difficulty and are shepherded into the corner of their tombs. To the left people read the inscription on their own tombstones and help each other to spruce up. The impression is one of great peace and joy. The artist thought the picture might serve as an altarpiece . A detailed drawing for the above composition (probably that exhibited at the Goupil Gallery, 1927 (20), as ‘Original Composition for the Resurrection’, bought by Lady Sybil Smith) was made while staying with Henry Lamb at Poole in 1922–3, and the painting itself was executed in Henry Lamb's studio in London (3 Vale Hotel, Vale of Health, Hampstead).

The date of completion is usually given as 1926, but the artist thought that he was still working on it at the beginning of 1927. Certain ideas for ‘The Resurrection: Cookham’ were fore-shadowed by the pair of paintings ‘The Resurrection of the Good and Bad’ completed in 1913, of which the artist wrote (1949, see exh. cat., Tate Gallery, 1955, Nos.9 and 10): ‘I love the Revelations and all it says but when I did the first biggish paintings of “The Resurrection”, in 1913, the punishment of the Bad was to be no more than that their coming out of the graves was not so easy as in the case of the Good.’ A pencil and wash study of negroes for N04239 was lent by Mrs Basil Gray to the Arts Council exhibition, 1955 (30). An oil sketch of the pleasure boat in the top left-hand corner belongs to Sir Henry Slesser.

Published in: Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, II 'The Resurrection, Cookham', Sir Stanley Spencer, 1924–7 | Tate Sir Stanley Spencer Support: 2743 x 5486 mm Collection Presented by Lord Duveen 1927 Reference Catalogue entry Display caption Spencer believed that the divine rested in all creation. He saw his home village of Cookham as a paradise in which everything was invested with mystical significance. The local churchyard here becomes the setting for the resurrection of the dead. Christ is enthroned in the church porch, cradling three babies, with God the Father standing behind. Spencer himself appears near the centre, naked, leaning against a grave stone; his fiancée Hilda lies sleeping in a bed of ivy. At the top left, risen souls are transported to Heaven in the pleasure steamers that then ploughed the Thames. Gallery label, September 2016 N04239 THE RESURRECTION, COOKHAM 1923–7 Not inscribed.

Canvas, 108×216 (274×549). Presented by Lord Duveen 1927. Coll: Purchased by the Duveen Paintings Fund Committee from the artist through the Goupil Gallery 1927. Exh: Goupil Gallery, February 1927 (54), as ‘The Resurrection’; Tate Gallery, November–December 1955 (25). Lit: Connoisseur, LXXVII, 1927, pp.250–1; ibid., LXXVIII, 1927, pp.98–101, 185–6; Drawing and Design, II, 1927, p.105, repr. p.115; Johnson, 1932, pp.331–2; Chamot, 1937, p.74; Studio, CXXVI, 1943, p.50, repr. p.51; Rothenstein, 1945, p.14, repr.

pls.21–4; John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters: Lewis to Moore, 1956, pp.181–2; Spencer, 1961, pp.172, 174–6; Collis, 1962, pp.77, 80–9, 91, 143, 162, 193, 243. Repr: R. H. Wilenski, The Modern Movement in Art, 1927, pl.4; Newton, 1947, pl.9 (in colour). The setting is Cookham churchyard with the Thames in the background. God the Father and Christ with the little children are seen under the porch in the centre; several ‘thinkers’, including Moses, are near by. Both black and white people have been included to make the treatment as universal as possible. The artist is seen reclining on a tombstone in the bottom right-hand corner, and again, naked, head in profile to the right, close to the porch.

His wife Hilda is in the overgrown grave in the foreground; she also appears smelling a flower on the left; in the distance she is seen a third time climbing a stile which leads to the River of Life. The figure rising from the flowered grave in the foreground is a memory of Sir Henry Slesser in his judge's wig. The bad emerge from their graves with some difficulty and are shepherded into the corner of their tombs. To the left people read the inscription on their own tombstones and help each other to spruce up. The impression is one of great peace and joy. The artist thought the picture might serve as an altarpiece . A detailed drawing for the above composition (probably that exhibited at the Goupil Gallery, 1927 (20), as ‘Original Composition for the Resurrection’, bought by Lady Sybil Smith) was made while staying with Henry Lamb at Poole in 1922–3, and the painting itself was executed in Henry Lamb's studio in London (3 Vale Hotel, Vale of Health, Hampstead).

The date of completion is usually given as 1926, but the artist thought that he was still working on it at the beginning of 1927. Certain ideas for ‘The Resurrection: Cookham’ were fore-shadowed by the pair of paintings ‘The Resurrection of the Good and Bad’ completed in 1913, of which the artist wrote (1949, see exh. cat., Tate Gallery, 1955, Nos.9 and 10): ‘I love the Revelations and all it says but when I did the first biggish paintings of “The Resurrection”, in 1913, the punishment of the Bad was to be no more than that their coming out of the graves was not so easy as in the case of the Good.’ A pencil and wash study of negroes for N04239 was lent by Mrs Basil Gray to the Arts Council exhibition, 1955 (30). An oil sketch of the pleasure boat in the top left-hand corner belongs to Sir Henry Slesser.

Published in: Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, II Artist Stanley Spencer Painted Biblical Scenes - Art Appreciation BellaOnline's Art Appreciation Editor Artist Stanley Spencer Painted Biblical Scenes An early modern painter who is considered one of the greatest British artists of the 20th century. What made Spencer's paintings on Christï¿½s crucifixion and resurrection so unusual? Sir Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) was born in Cookham, a Berkshire village where he remained for most of his life. He attended the Slade College of Art in London where he was a member of the "Neo-Primitives." It was said that Spencer would take the train home most days to his beloved Cookham, instead of staying in London. Spencerï¿½s Christian background was of great inspiration for his paintings. It is uncertain to this writer as to whether it is because of or in spite of his religion that caused him to be obsessed with death and resurrection. These were powerful themes in his artwork.

Spencerï¿½s unique naï¿½ve style was influenced by the artists Giotto, Paul Gauguin, and Diego Rivera. To Stanley Spencer, Giottoï¿½s works had a "lost Medieval purity," Paul Gauguin used vivid colors, lush foliage, and yellow and white paint worked into the foreground. Diego Rivera crowded the canvas with his subjects. These techniques greatly impressed Spencer and he adapted them to his style of painting. Most of Stanley Spencerï¿½s art was created from memory and scrapbook drawings. What makes Spencerï¿½s Biblical scenes so unusual is that they are not located in the Holy Land, but instead in Cookham, even using some of the villagers as the characters. His first sketch of the resurrection was abandoned (his painting "Apple Gatherers" of 1913-1914 was painted over it). One year later he painted, "The Resurrection of the Good and the Bad." In 1920-1921 Spencer would paint, "The Resurrection, Cookham" where the dead lift themselves up from the graves, holding onto the headstones, from a churchyard in Cookham.

By resurrection, Spencer is quoted as saying to his friend Richard Carline, "In this life we experience a kind of resurrection when we arrive at a state of awareness, a state of being in love." Spencer thought of sexual love as a type of "resurrection." This can be seen in his larger painting, "The Resurrection, Cookham" (1924-1927). Similar to the questions posed by Gauguinï¿½s painting, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" (1897-1898 MFA Boston, MA) Spencer intended to incorporate the past with the present, and the physical with the spiritual. As Gauguinï¿½s painting was meant to be read from right to left, Spencer probably doesnï¿½t mind where you begin, as there is much to contemplate. Spencer had served in WWI and some of the residents of Cookham had lost their lives. He may have wanted the village restored to its former state, thus his wish for the dead to be resurrected.

Spencerï¿½s last painting was "The Crucifixion" (1958), a grotesque but interesting painting that was eventually sold by Sothebyï¿½s London on May 2, 1990. Taking place on Cookham High Street, he drew the face of a local builder from memory for the face of one of the people nailing Christ to the cross. Mary Magdalen has collapsed at Christï¿½s feet; the villagers look out their windows emotionless. Stanley Spencer received knighthood in 1959, the year of his death. You can own a print of Stanley Spencerï¿½s "St. Francis and the Birds." To research art market prices,you only need enter the artist's last name below: A retrospective of painter Stanley Spencer | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close One of Stanley Spencer's formative experiences, growing up in Cookham, was being taken by his mother to the comfortable, cosy Wesleyan chapel along the village street. One by one, the familiar, everyday figures of the village gave themselves up to intense religious experience, flopping down on the floor of the chapel, becoming "Entirely Sanctified".

Though he knew he must not watch, the boy could not help imagining the shapes they were making on "the sacred piece of ground", a small patch of hard linoleum, while they were "coming to the Lord". The local grocer would become "more intensely a grocer" as he lay there "crumpled, his face turned up in a wonderful ecstasy". The Wesleyan chapel, once the place of such startling transformation scenes, has been the Stanley Spencer Gallery since 1962, a uniquely local tribute to an artist in the Berkshire village in which he lived and worked. When the gallery reopens next month after a year's refurbishment, there will be a new exhibit: the pencil drawing Ecstasy in a Wesleyan Chapel, made in 1937 as a study for a painting Spencer did not pursue. On the left there were to be "pews with us in them". Stanley was the eighth of nine surviving Spencer children, who appear in many of his paintings. On the right, Wesleyan souls are being transported off to glory. Spencer used to refer to his grand visionary paintings as his "queer ones". Ecstasy might well have been the queerest of them all.

For what other English artist has one place been so important? Not even Samuel Palmer's Shoreham has quite the significance of Stanley Spencer's Cookham. He was born there in 1891 and moved back into the same house on the high street, Fernlea, shortly before his death in 1959. His self-identification with the village was so obvious to his fellow students at the Slade that they called him "Cookham", not altogether kindly. Like a homing pigeon he went back and back and back, and the tenor of village life, the "unhappeningness" of it, the slow seasonal rhythms, the recurring, low-key, local ceremonies and events, gave shape to the peculiar combination of the literal and visionary that characterises Stanley Spencer's art. His retentiveness was extraordinary. Decades later, he could retrieve and rework the visual details of a late Victorian childhood in a village whose further reaches seemed "as remote as the Milky Way". Cookham was still a small and isolated place, an island surrounded by flowery water meadows, the highly coloured lushness re-evoked in Spencer's 1930s landscape Bellrope Meadow.

In winter, the village was often cut off by floods, and at worst people would retreat to the upper rooms of their houses, dependent on neighbours to deliver food by boat. Loaves of bread stuck on poles ascended to the bedroom windows. Spencer thrived on such sweetly bizarre scenes. An infant voyeur, he would peer through iron gates and over rooftops, describing later how this childhood curiosity had fuelled "his artistic and creative needs". When I wrote the introduction to the catalogue for the British Council's 1997 Stanley Spencer exhibition in Washington, I was banned from using the word "homely", a term that has pejorative meanings in the US. This was a dilemma. How to avoid the word that best expresses the essence of Spencer, the artist who found spiritual qualities in the most mundane and workaday of things? Where William Blake was aware of heavenly voices in the next room, Stanley Spencer was susceptible to visions of holiness along the Cookham lanes. For him, heaven was indeed "a part of Widbrook Common". A prime time for visitations came after a swim in Odney Weir. He and his brother Gilbert felt certain that the shepherds watched their flocks in the field below Cliveden Wood.

Just how innocent was Spencer? To see him as an unschooled primitive, a Home Counties Alfred Wallis, would be absolutely wrong. He trained at the Slade, then the leading London art school, in a pre-first world war generation that included Edward Wadsworth, Paul Nash, David Bomberg and Mark Gertler. Spencer was singled out by the Slade's famous teacher of drawing, Professor Henry Tonks, as the most original of all Slade students, and his precocious work was included in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912, shown alongside paintings by Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne. His family background was erudite, high-minded. "Pa" Spencer was the organist at nearby Hedsor church, the frock-coated bearded patriarch we recognise in Stanley's paintings. A proselytising intellectual, he would cycle around Cookham reciting Ruskin and he founded the Cookham Free Library in the front room at Fernlea. His sons were avid readers. After tea, Stanley and Gilbert would go up to the front bedroom and read the large Bible or John Donne by candlelight. Spencer talks of his mind being toughened by the metaphysicals.

His startlingly precise view of Cookham churchyard as "a suburb of heaven" comes direct from Donne, and one of his earliest paintings, John Donne Arriving in Heaven, is a literal interpretation of the poet's Go to Heaven by Heaven, arriving through a special celestial side entrance. He loved Donne's combination of ferocity and lambency. Spencer, too, was clear-sighted, not a sentimentalist. When Spencer left the Slade and returned to Cookham, he entered what he called "a kind of earthly paradise. Everything seemed fresh and to belong to the morning." He began on what became a monumental series of idiosyncratic visionary paintings that drew on village life and topography, transforming the local into the epic with an intense ambition unparalleled in 20th-century British art. His secret garden painting, Zacharias and Elizabeth, was started on the dining table at Fernlea in 1913. The Centurion's Servant is set in the maid's bedroom in the attic, with Spencer's siblings grouped praying round the curly Victorian iron bedstead with white bedknobs. Stanley himself is sprawling in the centre.

In this painting, his "bed picture", the Bible story of Christ and the Centurion provides a starting point for something weirder, more complex and more human, full of feeling. Beds are blissful. Spencer tracks back to his infant Cookham memories of being brought a tray of tea in bed. Spencer was evolving a form of art dependent on close personal involvement with the subjects of his paintings, the candid, introspective, "me-myselfness" of his vision. All this was interrupted by the first world war. He enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and in 1916 was sent to Macedonia to join the British forces fighting the Bulgarians and Greeks. It was the first time he had been abroad. He responded to the wildness of the Yugoslavian landscape and returned after the war for a painting holiday in Sarajevo, where he discovered "something equal in degree of intensity" to Cookham. When Spencer was finally invalided out of the army in December 1918, he found the painting Swan Upping at Cookham, left unfinished when he had enlisted, lying on the bed at home. Four years' war service was not what Stanley Spencer would have chosen.

But, as with other artists and writers of the period, most notably the poet David Jones, Spencer was creatively exhilarated by his sudden immersion in this unexpected world of military rule-books, random bravery and unforced camaraderie. Over the next decade, he gradually unfurled his deeply absorbed wartime experiences in a sequence of paintings that are surely among the most moving and impressive of artistic responses to the horrors of 20th- century European warfare. Spain has Picasso's Guernica. Britain has the Stanley Spencer cycle at Burghclere. The series of 19 paintings was commissioned in 1923 for the Sandham Memorial chapel by Louis and Mary Behrend. Mary Behrend's brother, Lieutenant Sandham, had died after an illness contracted in wartime. He, too, had served in Macedonia. The chapel was purpose-built on its own site in Burghclere, a village in Hampshire 30 miles south-west of Cookham. "What ho, Giotto!" Spencer exclaimed on receiving the commission. Giotto's early 14th-century frescoes in the Arena chapel at Padua, reproduced in the popular Gowans and Gray art books, had delighted him since he was a boy.

Spencer carried out much of the painting in situ in the chapel, working on wide bolts of canvas stretched along the nave. He tells it as a story, simple and direct, the narrative of Stanley Spencer's war: the wounded arriving at the Beaufort war hospital in Bristol, where Spencer himself had been an orderly; the army training centre at Tweseldon in Surrey; the intimate routines, dressing, shaving, making beds and filling water bottles at the military camps in Macedonia. The cycle has its climax in the joyful, crowded central composition, The Resurrection of the Soldiers, covering the whole east wall. These are real people, recognisably our forebears. They are men from English villages whose names are lettered carefully on so many thousand village war memorials. Spencer treats the grand themes of glory and redemption with matter-of-factness and tendresse. Spencer's deep feeling for Cookham was fused with his sense of the erotic. He was still sexually inexperienced, though, in his early 30s, when he fell in love with the artist Hilda Carline, telling her she represented another Cookham to him, a new land to be discovered.

They married in 1925, by which time he had embarked on one of his greatest paintings, The Resurrection, Cookham, now in Tate Britain. Villagers rise from their graves in Cookham churchyard, a place of huge significance from Spencer's boyhood: not exactly a playground, but a part of the village for which the children felt a fascinated awe. In this painting, Spencer's early understanding of the "richness that underlies the Bible in Cookham" merges with his late discovery of adult glories of love, sex and cohabitation. The figure of Hilda appears in it three times. In the early 1930s, Stanley, Hilda and their two daughters were living at Lindworth, a substantial semi-detached house, on the high street between the chapel and Fernlea. The visitations continued, accelerated. Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors, a marvellous mystic painting of this period, is based on a tale told to Stanley by his father of the impact on Cookham of the tail of Halley's comet in 1910. The violent sunset made the ancient Sally Tubb imagine that the end of the world had come. She knelt praying at her gate.

Spencer could not remember Sally, so he used her daughter Sarah for the painting, which shows angels greeting her in the heaven that was Cookham, bearing gifts of things she loved: a papier mâché text; the postcard of Cookham church sold in the postcard rack outside the village shop. The heavenly visitors are neighbourly figures depicted very solemnly. Spencer's villageyness is anything but quaint. He made no special claims for Cookham per se. It was a fairly ordinary village of its time. But he loved it and revered it as a source of inspiration: Cookham was the place where things happened to him. The Sarah Tubb vision was one of the first pictures for Spencer's projected Church House series, intended for another large, purpose-designed building celebrating his adoration of the village and its people. His plans for these celebratory cycles of love, human and animal, sacred and profane, grew more outré with the burgeoning of his illicit feelings for Patricia Preece, the glamorous lesbian daughter of an army officer first encountered in the Copper Kettle teashop in the high street. He painted her into the fabric of the village, into his best-remembered places, like the little alleyway alongside Fernlea.

Spencer was interested by the complex social strata of the village, coming as he did from a family perched precariously between the benefactors and the beneficiaries. In the early 1950s, back home again from Glasgow, where as an official second world war artist he recorded shipbuilding on the Clyde, he began a vast new sequence of paintings, Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta. In this series, he returns to the Edwardian regattas of his childhood, the punts, straw hats and blazers. For this high point of the summer, all the villagers converge but stay strictly separated into those on the river and those watching from the bank. The great treasure of the Stanley Spencer Gallery at Cookham is the last Regatta painting, a stupendous work intended as the altarpiece for the Church House "river aisle". It was left half-finished at his death. The river Thames is viewed from Cookham Bridge. Christ himself sits enthroned in a rotund wicker boating chair on the deck of the old horse ferry barge moored by the Ferry Hotel. Villagers, and swans, assemble. The Last Judgment is at hand.

The painting clearly shows us Spencer's working methods, the crowded composition gradually emerging from the squared-up stretch of canvas. It also, wonderfully, recreates the mood and details of early 20th-century Thameside village life. · The Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire, reopens in early September. Details: 01628 471885. · Fiona MacCarthy's book Stanley Spencer: An English Vision is published by Yale. The Artist - Stanley Spencer's Photo Gallery Stanley Spencer's Photo Gallery This section contains some unique photographs taken of Sir Stanley Spencer while he was living in his beloved Cookham. 1958 Stanley Spencer with his old pram chassis walking down a Cookham lane with his easel and canvas. The pram chassis can be seen in the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham High Street, along with his crayon and palette and well-worn Bible. Stanley Spencer was born in Cookham in 1892, one of eleven children. His grandfather was the village builder, his father William, a professional musician and organist at a nearby church, with a passion for the Bible.

He is said to have been an enterprising eccentric who used to ride a lady's bike around the village, as he recited Ruskin. When, as a boy, Stanley chose art for a profession, no obstacle was put in his way and in due course he went to the Slade School of Fine Art, travelling daily to and from his home in Cookham. Those years were splendid times at the Slade, where the finest art teaching in Europe was being given to a host of brilliant students. At the Slade he was nicknamed "Cookham" because he seldom stopped talking about the place. His fearsomely influential teacher at the Slade, Professor Tonks, got him a scholarship, which was then denied him on the grounds of his general academic incompetence. Sir Stanley paints under his famous umbrella. The fiery 5' 2" man with the silvery thatch of hair may one day be acknowledged as one of Britain's greatest religious painters since the Middle Ages. Although in his lifetime he was one of the most controversial. From 1916-1918 Spencer served as a hospital orderly with the Field Ambulance Service in Macedonia. There he was a daily witness to carnage and human suffering.

Spencer was prepared to serve his fellow men in humility and to try and make amends for their pain. This notion of redemption was one that remained with the artist all his life. He turned to the Bible for his inspiration and to his village, Cookham, for the setting of many of his pictures. Apart from serving in the RAMC during the first World War and brief stops around UK, Switzerland and China, he never really left Cookham, the source of his inspiration. "When I was young about the village as a child, I was aware of a wonderful something which was everywhere to be felt, it was bang all around me, it was heaven as clear as the Cookham day" Stanley Spencer Spencer with a neighbour in High Road. Stanley Spencer was married to Hilda Carline in 1925 for 11 years. Spencer continued to write love letters to her long after her death. During his marriage to Hilda, Spencer met Patricia Preece, with whom he became infatuated. Spencer wanted to keep both women. Hilda's brother wrote "He has no wish to lose Hilda, but wanted Patricia, not merely as a visitor but to reside with them, as he hoped.

It was characteristic of him to presume that his desires, whatever they might be, must be acceptable. He could not tolerate being thwarted." In 1937 Spencer divorced Hilda and married Patricia. For their honeymoon Patricia went down to St Ives, to be followed later by Spencer, who was finishing a painting in Cookham. Hilda travelled down to Cookham and Spencer on arrival in Cornwall admitted to Patricia to having made love to Hilda and was amazed at Patricia's expression of abhorrence. In the late '30s he told Fr D'Arcy, Master of Campion Hall, the Jesuit House at Oxford, "I've got two wives, one divorced and one not and I feel equally married to both." Hilda's ultimate rival was not Patricia, but the sacred spirit of Cookham. An unequal competition she could never win. 1957 Stanley buys a Christmas decoration. To Spencer Cookham was the village of his dreams. He was a story telling painter and he presented the literature of the Bible as incidents of Cookham village life. To Spencer it was all quite simple.

Why should not Christ carry his Cross through the High Street, past brick houses and iron railings, beneath the gaze of women who watch from windows where lace curtains blow? Spencer brought miracles of the Old Testament into Cookham High Street. There go Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors, St Francis and the Birds, Villagers and Saints. But he was in an age that was horrified by such simple straightforward things. In a Resurrection painting he has included an old country woman trimming the grass of a grave because she had explained to him "I like to give mother a clip". Spencer was a visionary who brought together the common life around him and the splendours of the imagination. 1958 Stanley Spencer in front of Cookham Church. Stanley Spencer was knighted in June 1959 and was for more than 30 years in and out of the news with his vivid controversial pictorial conceptions of religious subjects that in turn brought him high praise and also heavy criticism. His resurrection picture created fierce controversy. It depicted the graves opening in Cookham churchyard and local people arising to the sound of the Last Trumpet.

"Back to the bottle" was a frequent utterance of the painter, the "bottle" being another Resurrection picture. In his eyes Christ came to Cookham, and the Resurrection took place in the local graveyard. It contains the figures of Moses and other prophets, ranged in stone seats along the church wall. Soon after Spencer completed the picture, the patronage of the Behrand family enabled him to spend five years painting his own Sistine in the tiny chapel in the village of Burghclere, near Newbury. The chapel is now owned by the National Trust. To him the visions were no less real than the village of Cookham where we lived. Later in his life Stanley Spencer lived at Cliveden View in Cookham Rise. In an upstairs room at his house he had set down on canvases great and small, a vivid story of his life. His early childhood, places remembered, his religious beliefs and the beauty with which his village of Cookham is endowed. Spencer made Cookham, its church, bridge, stretch of Thames, cottages, fields and its flowers world famous.

In 1958 he held an exhibition at Cookham Church in aid of church funds, this was the year he became very ill and underwent an operation for cancer at the nearby Canadian War Memorial Hospital. The scruffy little figure who seldom washed and looked like a scarecrow, once said "I am on the side of the angels and dirt", was a familiar sight in Cookham as he painted. He took an umbrella and pram with him wherever he want. When he went for his knighthood from the Queen, he carried his old shopping bag with him to Buckingham Palace. His daily help for twelve years, Mrs Emily Price said she used to sew on his buttons and try and keep him clean. She said "He was a pet. He was also in may ways like a child. I had to bully him into getting his hair cut and letting me wash his clothes." Two sisters who lived at the end of his lane said that he would drop in and say "Can I have a tinkle" and he would sit down at their piano and play Bach and Chopin. People in Cookham loved the eccentric, grubby little genius, he was kind, gentle and generous.

Even the children of Cookham adored him and would cluster around his easel and watch spellbound. 1959 Stanley Spencer with his unfinished painting of 'Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta'. This was the painting that Stanley was working on when he died in 1959. It is a bustling exciting picture, full of people, full of colour, full of life. A row of punts is lined up along one bank and sitting on a red cushion in a wicker chair in Cookham's Old Horse Ferry is a bearded man in a black straw hat. This is Christ as Sir Stanley Spencer depicted him. He is surrounded by disciples and children in the old ferry boat that used to ply up and down the Thames. All around is the summertime confusion, crowded banks and bobbing punts. Spencer had worked on the picture for nearly four years, sitting as was his habit, on a stool perched on top of a trestle table. This great unfinished painting started as 60 chalk drawings in 1953. Spencer completed one piece before moving on to the next, working with small brushes, his nose almost touching the canvas.

Right up to the end of his life, Spencer had no hesitation in showing Christ in modern terms and in everyday circumstances. Spencer put Bible scenes into modern dress and transferred them from Jerusalem to Cookham's High Street, where he was born. A Christmas Card signed by Stanley Spencer 'to Cissie and the little boy'. The address is the Back Lane, Cookham. LINES WRITTEN ON THE DEATH OF SIR STANLEY SPENCER CBE, RA Here, in the beauty of this River Village, God gave a man some vision of His Light, He saw the Glory, and, within his Parish, Sought to interpret it for our delight. In simple faith, this fortunate Immortal Nurtured his talent, exercised his art, Touching the cold grey canvasses with beauty, Borne on his brush the pictures in his heart. See with your own small eyes, his world around you, Walk through his lanes and sit beneath his trees. Can you see Christ, as he did, in a boater? Can you hear God, as he did, in the breeze?

Paints them in dearest detail on his walls, Shows us the mire and misery of battle, Echoes the empty brag of bugle calls. Thousands have seen and walked the humble gardens, The leafy lanes, and river paths he trod. The places in which everyone sees beauty, Are where he painted Mary, and saw God. We must be glad that he has seen things for us, Revealed his memories, and portrayed his mind. Those whom he knew rejoice because they knew him, And mourn all anonymous mankind.

Anon 1000+ images about Stanley Spencer on Pinterest | Wool shop, Wisteria and Self-portraits Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891 – 1959) The Builders It's About Time: Englishmen Working by Stanley Spencer 1891-1959 See more 1000+ images about Stanley Spencer on Pinterest | Reunions, Portrait and Self portraits It's About Time: Portraits of Women by British Artist Stanley Spencer 1891-1959 See More Stanley Spencer's The Resurrection, Cookham has been given a face- lift and a whole new lease of life by a school on the Isle of Dogs | The Independent Stanley Spencer's The Resurrection, Cookham has been given a face- lift and a whole new lease of life by a school on the Isle of Dogs Thursday 11 May 1995 23:02 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture When in 1923 Stanley Spencer painted his famous work The Resurrection, Cookham, he can little have suspected that it would one day be used to educate East End teenagers.

Spencer presents a surreal view of his local parish church, in which the dead, wrapped in winding sheets, rise uncorrupted from the grave to greet the living on the pleasant summer's afternoon of the day of resurrection. The picture is a tangible expression of the artist's faith and one of the most memorable images of 20th-century British art. It took Spencer four years to paint, but in a somewhat shorter time, the students of George Green School, Isle of Dogs, have transformed his vision into something quite different. During their autumn term last year a small group of students from the school, whose GCSE year had been using the Tate's collection to gain a greater understanding of art and cultural identity, concentrated specifically on Spencer's picture. Using photomontage and computer technology, they created the extraordinary image currently on display at the Tate Gallery called Awakenings (left). Now, in place of the Berkshire countryside, we have Docklands, complete with the Light Railway and the looming mass of Canary Wharf. The church has been replaced by the school and along its wall, in place of the chosen, sit a parade of popular heroes including Bob Marley, footballers and feminists.

On an armchair in the pictorial centre, sits a man, presumably a master, cradling two of Spencer's self-portraits. And behind him, the ghost at the feast, is the brooding presence of the painter himself. What would he have made of it? And, more importantly, what did the students make of it? Whatever they gained, it was obviously a fascinating exercise and it makes a nice contrast with the cosy, confident 1920s calm of the original. Stanley must be turning in his grave. 'Awakenings' at the Tate Gallery, Millbank, SW1 (0171-887 8000) Opening hours, Mon-Sat 10am-5.50pm, Sun 2-5.50pm, free. Pimlico Iain Gale

Question: Which artist painted the picture, 'The Resurrection In Cookham Churchyard'?
Answer: STANLEY SPENCER